>These threads have been most helpful to me in clarifying the formulation of
my work in terms of phenomenology. The specific human (shamanic if you will)
experiences/phenomenon can be argued as "universal" in the sense that
humans, regardless of their position in chronological time or geological
space, practicing shamanic techniques can experience the same phenomenon.
From one phenomenological worldview they would describe or depict their
experience as duality; from another phenomenological worldview they would
describe or depict their experience as unity. Neither is an absolute
universal phenomenon, but both are true phenomenon experienced from a
>worldview or as an experiential phenomenon.
That’s a productive way of looking at it I think, though the ‘universalism’ remains controversial and would require evidence. But that doesn’t effect the dual phenomena perspective. Though it still begs the question of what is the reality behind the experienced phenomena. We can avoid the question, or say its unknowable, but this could be a slippery slope to all sorts of irrational arguments.
>My original angst in the objectivity-subjectivity debate is that some insist
their disciplinary presentation genre is more objective than another's
chosen "voice." The voice or disciplinary genre is put on by both presenters
for the purpose of making an academic argument in their own favor, yet
allowing for other voices to "legitimately" join the argument. When an
Academic School claims otherwise, they are practicing a tautological elitism
that renders their own work a "Huis Clos." The Academy is about opening
doors for the students and inviting them to join in the ongoing process of
>opening doors. The Academy is not about closed doors.
I sympathise with that. I suspect it has to do with the loss of hierarchy within the disciplines. Philosophy should really be the master narrative in all of this, it may be divided in itself but that should still be resolvable rationally. I recognise that reason itself is not uncontroversial, but we can’t give up on it completely or anything goes.
Reason just needs to correct itself. Then the disciplines can cluster around a sound philosophical position.
>However, it does behoove the scholar to position themselves within an
Academic field of discourse that welcomes their own phenomenological
worldview, as embodied/argued in their own works. Again, I seriously doubt a School that purports to be presenting only a historical figure's
phenomenological worldview and not their own concurrently as well. In
Academia there is always a point being made. For readers or students, that
point-argument-angle answers the "so what?" and hopefully elicits an
interactive response from the reader-student. The whole purpose of writing a disciplinary Academic "story" about a historical figure, which begins with the "who, what, why, when, and where," is the "so what?" or "who >cares?"
Well yes, but there needs to be a dichotomy between historical perspective and rational perspective.
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